As I wrote in my op-ed piece earlier today, Nick Clegg is the first major party leader to run for Prime Minister on an anti-British ticket. He is filled with a self-loathing for his nation and its institutions, which came across in spades in his response to The Times letter.

First, no one “runs for Prime Minister” in this country. The leader of the party with the largest number of votes becomes the Prime Minister. Second, how is Nick Clegg “anti-British”? While I have no love for Nick Clegg or the Liberal Democrats, this rant is quite bizarre and seems to come from the same wellspring as his Moonie faith. It’s the same kind of rant that he normally reserves for Barack Obama.

Gardiner spent the entire 10 days during the coalition negotiations fretting about a possible Labour-Lib Dem coalition. Little did he realise that the Lib Dems would hop into bed with the Tories – even I knew they would and I am not a well-paid political hack who writes third-rate articles for right wing magazines.

Shamelessly, Gordon Brown is threatening to stay on as Prime Minister as late as September, despite overwhelmingly losing last week’s general election. In the meantime, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, according to Gordon’s grand plan, will stitch up a “progressive” government that will also include the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Once this government is formed, Brown will ask Labour to hold a leadership contest, with David Miliband as the likely front-runner to succeed him.

Simple arithmetic meant that a coalition between the Lib Dems and Labour wasn’t going to happen. A Tory minority government would have easily collapsed. Gardiner persisted.

It is frankly the sort of farcical development one expects in Khartoum or Caracas, and not in one of the world’s greatest democracies

Khartoum? Caracas? Is he off his trolley? The short answer to that is “Yes, he is”. He chooses Khartoum simply because it is the capital of Sudan, a country that has long been associated with Islamism (remember ‘Chinese’ Gordon and the Mahdi Revolt?) and Caracas because it is the capital of Venezuela and it is where the US right’s Number One bogeyman, Hugo Chavez is in power.

On the very same day, Gardiner, presumably unable to sleep and sick with worry over the prospect of a Lib-Lab coalition, wrote this blog. The headline screams “David Cameron should say no to a coalition with the Lib Dems”.

It is simply an illusion to believe the Liberals share with the Conservatives some kind of common vision for dealing with the massive debt crisis and saving Britain from a financial meltdown. They are, even more than Labour, the party of Big Government and endless state intervention, and are the enemies of free enterprise. Their socialist-style solutions will strangle the markets, force wealth out of the country, and scare away much needed investment. It is worth remembering Clegg’s pledge in the third televised debate to heavily tax banking profits and restrict bonuses in the financial services sector, the surest way to kill the City and end Britain’s supremacy as a centre of global finance.

“Socialist-style solutions”? In Britain? Gardiner is not a man of vision. Let’s put it this way, he’d never cut it as a seaside clairvoyant. The Petulengro family must be mightily relieved to hear this. But notice how he stirs up the paranoia, which he serves up with lashings of bile and hyperbole. That line “kill the City and end Britain’s supremacy as a centre of global finance” is meant to appeal to our collective sense of reason but quite honestly, I couldn’t care less if the banks pulled out of London. The British economy has recently been built on the daft products that have been dreamt up by City numbskulls looking for new ways to extend their greed. Those aren’t real products like ships or steel girders; they’re purely imagined.

His analysis is, again, wanting. A Conservative minority government? Is he serious?

In September, Gardiner made an almighty great cock up over prisoner’s voting rights as this blog points out. I quite like this quote,

The problem with Nile Gardiner is that he is a hypocrite. For a so-called expert dealing with the US led alliance against rogue states, not to see when the UK is itself a rogue state in Europe shows that he is either blind or as daft as George Bush and that he has the morals of Tony Blair going into an illegal war with Iraq and claiming he did what he believed to be right!

Liam Fox is that rare politician of tremendous principle, who unfailingly places country before political self-interest. He believes strongly in the greatness of Britain as a nation, and that its continuing role as a global power depends upon her ability to project military force, including a capacity to fight alongside the UK’s closest ally, the United States.

It’s almost as if he’s writing about the US here and not the UK. What’s he trying to tell us? The headline says it all “Liam Fox is the Churchill of the coalition”. You see how he summoned up the ghost of Churchill, just as Thatcher had done in the 1980’s? This offers us a window into his thoughts. He uses Churchill as a mantra or a magical incantation that is intended to cast all demons aside – as though he were a shaman. Trouble is, it is ineffective and makes him look desperate. His idol, Thatcher, tried to use the same trick and it blew up in her face.

Gardiner is an obsessive and a scaremonger. He’s also failed to tell us whether or not he is still a member of the Unification Church. However, it is unlikely that he’s left because Moonies don’t often leave the ‘church’ of their own accord.

Here is a quick look at what the Unification Church is and what it does,

As I was working at my computer yesterday morning, I looked out of my window and I could see loads of police standing around on Queen Caroline Street. There was “Police Line. Do not cross” tape across the road. I couldn’t actually see what was happening but I suspected one of two things: the first was that there was some sort of hostage situation and the second was that someone had been killed. It was the latter.

A CYCLIST has died after a collision with a lorry in Queen Caroline Street.

Police and ambulance crews were called to the Hammersmith street at 8.24am on Thursday morning to find the biker, believed to be a woman in her 20s, dead at the scene.

The road was closed for most of the day as traffic officers investigated the cause of the crash and quizzed witnesses.

A police tent was put up and a waste collection truck also cordoned off after the collision.

I suspect that the woman came out of Worlidge Street without looking and was hit by the refuse lorry. I see this sort of thing all the time on Queen Caroline Street: people on bikes not looking for other road-users when they’re dealing with a junction. They don’t creep and peep or they enter the minor road on the right instead of the left.

Of course, it may well be the driver’s fault. I’ve seen some shocking driving down there. The sight lines are terrible on parts of Queen Caroline Street and there are times when there are cars illegally parked on the corner of Worlidge Street and that little access road that runs between College Mansions and the council flats. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I once encountered a driver who had parked right across the entrance to the Peabody Estate – all because he was in a Mercedes.

I was out cycling earlier and as I was approaching the junction of the slip road outside the Hammersmith Apollo and Queen Caroline Street, I saw two blokes to my left: one of whom was wobbling in the middle of the road and the other was on the wrong side of the road. And no, the idiot in the middle of the road wasn’t cycling outside of the “door zone”. He was talking to his dizzy chum. This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen this kind of thing on Queen Caroline Street. It happens all the time. People get fooled into thinking that it’s quiet road. It isn’t.

Dear all,
I have some more information regarding the fatal road traffic collision that happened in Queen Caroline Street on 28/04/2011 at 0820 hours. A cyclist was travelling north-east. When she was about 15 metres south-west from the junction with Worlidge Street the near-side of her bike hit a car that was correctly parked by the north-west kerb in the parking bay and fell off the bike. At the same time a refuse lorry was travelling south-west leaving a gap of 1.5 metres between it’s off-side and the row of parked cars (by the north-west kerb) at 15mph. The cyclist fell between the front and rear axles of the refuse lorry, went under the rear wheels and died as a result of her injuries.

The parking bay was fully occupied with parked cars. The weather was dry, about 15 degrees Celsius. There were no defects with the road or its layout that could have contributed to this collision.

I have looked at the collision statistics for 36 months to Dec 2010 and found that, whilst there were two collisions involving pedal cyclists nearby, neither were similar to this one; both involved the pedal cyclist making a right turn.

The police refuse to accept that the way the road is laid out contributed to the death of this cyclist. But I have talked to other cyclists about Queen Caroline Street and they tell me the same thing: the sight lines are terrible and many motorists drive inconsiderately along the street.

It’s a funny old business, this referendum on the voting system. It’s become a bitter battle between those who don’t want a change in the system and those who don’t want the Alternative Vote ( AV) but see it as a sort of halfway house between First Past The Post (FPTP) and the real deal. That’s how simple it is. No one really wants AV but those who are running the Yes campaign aren’t honest enough to tell you that. They’re too wrapped up in their imaginations.

But those who support the No vote aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory either. Their campaign has relied on emotional blackmail and cheap tricks. The campaign has adopted an ad hominem tone to it. Nick Clegg has become the object of ridicule for a campaign that has been orchestrated from the Tory side of the argument. Clegg apparently thinks that AV is a”miserable little compromise”. But he accepted AV as part of the coalition deal; he wasn’t politically savvy enough to spot a lemon when it was presented to him as a roadworthy vehicle. Clegg loves the high of being in government. It’s intoxicating.

What has really developed is a phony war between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – both of them in power but engaging in a little mudslinging for the benefit of the cameras. “Look” say the Lib Dems, “We’re a separate party, with our own identity”. But no one wants to hear it. No one is interested hearing how the Lib Dems are playing nice cop to the Tories’ nasty cop. We’ve read the script, seen the film. One cop is kneeing you in the goolies, while the other is offering to get you a cup of tea. They’re the perfect pair.

I’m voting “No”. Not because I want to screw the Lib Dems (they’ve done that to themselves) but because I don’t believe that AV is any better than FPTP. Proportional Representation in the form of real PR, as exists in Ireland with Single Transferable Vote system (STV) or the Mixed Member Proportional voting system (MMP) as exists in Scotland, are the real ways forward. Even AV+ is a little better than this AV bollocks.

But do we really need a referendum on this issue NOW? My answer to that question is “no”.

I found this article in Inside Housing. It’s a scandal that homeless ex-offenders are, in effect, told to remain homeless and are handed tents to live in. Of course there are loads of Torygraph readers who would agree with this sort of thing but, as far as Nowhere Towers is concerned, they’re not human.

Ex-offenders handed tents to live in

Homeless ex-offenders in Nottinghamshire are being issued with tents by the region’s probation service.

The service confirmed it gave tents to five people last year when hostel accommodation could not be found.

Peter Anthony, accommodation, benefits and advice officer with Nottinghamshire Probation Service, said it would prefer stable accommodation for ex-offenders. But he added: ‘When there simply is no other option we will, if it is appropriate, provide a tent and sleeping bag.

‘If you send someone away from the office into the night and they have literally got nowhere to go, the chances are that they will commit offences.’
Mr Anthony added that bed spaces in the region were reducing due to the closure of a number of hostels. ‘This year we expect it [the use of tents] to increase exponentially,’ he added.

Nile Gardiner seems a little sensitive about his past. So much so, that he’s removed any reference of his connection to the Unification Church from his Wikipedia entry. He’s even managed to get the owners of this website to close the page of a book on which he is quoted as having cleaned up anti-Moon graffiti from the campus before Moon’s visit to Yale. No matter. People like Gardiner leave trails on the Internet and he can’t close down all the sites that mention his connection to the Moonies.

One of the Unificationist graduate students in history at Yale, Nile Gardiner, and a Christian friend, took mops and buckets and proceeded to clean it all off. This of course started allegations concerning free speech, and many articles in the Yale newspapers covered this. They became quiet famous in the Yale conservative circles as “The Moppers.” Literally cleaning up Yale!

In spite of Gardiner’s attempts to expunge all Moonie references from the Internet, the above quote actually comes from the Unification Church. I’d like to see how long that stays on the Web before he orders it to be removed. At any rate, there is no way I’ll be taking it down – even if he tries to put pressure on me.

Without a sympathetic president in the White House, the Moonies – through Gardiner – have been fighting a rearguard action to smear Obama. There isn’t a week that goes by where Gardiner isn’t attacking Obama on his blog or in his columns. Sometimes the attacks on Obama look rather personal. This is from a conservative blog in the States called “The Last Tradition”. Here’s one of the more hackneyed distortions,

Barack Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, and has made apologising for his country into an art form. In a speech to the United Nations last September he stated that “no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” It is difficult to see how a US president who holds these views and does not even accept America’s greatness in history can actually lead the world’s only superpower with force and conviction.

Sometimes, when I look at stuff like this, it’s as if I’m reading something that was written in the 19th century. To be honest, I don’t even know if Gardiner is a US citizen. As far as I know, he’s still British. So why does he get so aeriated about the US and its standing as a world superpower? Is it because he’s nostalgic for empire and is vicariously living the experience of empire (and by extension, classical liberalism) by banging the drum for US imperialism and Pax Americana?

Gardiner’s silence on his connection with the Moonies is strange. In purely psychoanalytical terms, it is this silence that says everything.

…except for the ones that are being worn by the ‘military advisors’. The dispatching of ‘advisors’ is often a prelude to a full-scale war. In the late 1950’s, the US sent advisors to what was then Saigon before the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965. Truth be told, the US provided more than just “advisors”, there was a sizeable military presence in Vietnam before 1965. Indeed my father was stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in 1963. So when people tell me that the Vietnam War started in 1965, I know better.

This conflict began with so-called “no fly zones”, which are also precursors to a full-blown war. I do find it odd, that within this “no fly zone”, Libyan ground forces are being attacked. I mean, when was the last time you saw a flying tank or a flying howitzer?

We were told that “regime change” was not part of plan in Libya but it seems as though this has been the intention all along. The UN Security Council resolution that authorized the “no fly zones” did not call for regime change but you can bet your bottom dollar that that’s the plan. Scameron wants it. Sokrazy wants it. Even Obomba wants it. Although the public has been told that this “isn’t about oil”, the fact of the matter is that it is about oil. The last time anyone said “this isn’t about oil” was in the run up to the Iraq invasion and guess what? It was about oil. Blair and Bush lied.

So when William Hague tells us that there aren’t any boots on the ground. He’s a liar. There are boots on the ground and there will be more of them.

UPDATE: 2/2/12 @1942

Well, it seems that there were special forces boots on Libya soil as well as those of the very special advisors. I wonder, could there have been more of them? Boots, I mean. Possibly. Anything’s possible.